Professor Moses Rischin, emeritus professor at San Francisco State University and a pioneering scholar in the field of American Jewish history, died on August 21.

Born in Brooklyn, the son of two Russian immigrant parents who loved Hebrew, young Moses was sent to study in the then recently-opened Yeshiva of Flatbush, providing him with a foundation in Hebrew and Judaica that later served him well. In 1947, he entered the graduate program at Harvard, where he encountered pioneering historian Oscar Handlin. Rischin was one of Handlin’s most influential disciples, following him into the field of American Jewish history.

Rischin worked on the first analytic bibliography of American Jewish history, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and published as a pamphlet by Harvard University Press under the title An Inventory of American Jewish History. The volume defined the contours of the emerging field and alerted students to the breadth and depth of its literature, with insights that helped shape future scholarly directions.

Rischin received his doctorate from Harvard, with the publication of The Promised City: New York’s Jews 1870-1914. It defined the highest standards of scholarship in the field, and it remained in print for decades.